Outreach activities of the Institute of Integrative Biology and the School of Life Sciences at the University of Liverpool

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Botanical University Challenge was dreamt up in 2016 by Dr Jon Mitchley (University of Reading) and Professor John Warren (University of Aberystwyth) to celebrate the plants in plant science. Anyone who has talked about biology with school children knows that most think plants are boring. This contrasts with the adult science world where plants are anything but boring. Once at university, some students change their opinion and embrace the challenges of plant science. Botanical University Challenge is an opportunity for students interested in plants meet up and show off their knowledge and interest.

The Institute of Integrative Biology at University of Liverpool researches fundamental and applied biology and over ten of the seventy-five research groups work with plants. National and international funders support their research in areas ranging from fundamental processes like photosynthesis, cell physiology, disease and taxonomy to agriculture and effects of climate change.

The University of Liverpool was therefore pleased to host the third Botanical University Challenge on 19 February 2020. The amount of organisation behind the two and a half hour event was substantial. Outside the university and away from the students, Professor John Warren led the task of getting the questions together. These involved words, pictures and, for the first time, real plant material. Devising a balanced set of questions with short answers for each round was a challenge in itself.

The venue was the University of Liverpool’s Botanic Gardens at Ness on the Wirral peninsular. Several staff at the garden were key to arrangements as well as providing plant material for some of the questions, particularly Jen Lemon-Parkins and Tim Baxter. Staff and students from the School of Life Sciences and Institute of Integrative Biology at University of Liverpool, notably Drs Raj Whitlock, Peter Walley and James Hartwell, were involved with planning. On the day Dr Christoph Hahn and undergraduates Tracey Houghton and Roberta Brewster were essential for organising the teams and making the event run smoothly.

There were a record seven university teams in the competition – Edge Hill, Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan, Reading and York. In addition, the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland supported the event, especially publicising it through a network of local societies. The result was a comfortably full lecture theatre on a wet Wednesday afternoon to enjoy the teams demonstrating their knowledge and quick wits.

The questions ranged from the deceptively simple (What is the name of the plant or molecule in this picture?) to the more difficult (During photosynthesis where does the evolved oxygen come from?). Recalling information is definitely more difficult while being stared at by an audience but the quizmaster Emeritus Professor Alan McCarthy kept the teams answering with a mixture of charm and authority. Both reaction times for pressing a buzzer and knowledge were tested during the afternoon, and a coffee-break after the initial preliminary rounds was essential. Several of the teams were competing for the first time, but were not daunted even though the University of Reading team won (again), with University of Liverpool the runner-up (again).

Comments from the audience showed how much they enjoyed the event, and how impressed they were by the students.

Plans for Botanical University Challenge 2021 have started, with the venue again likely to be in northern England.

On 12th and 13th June 2019, the natural world took over a corner of the atrium at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. Nightingale song and the tinkling trickle of a running stream played out across the atrium as a spotlight drew the eye to our little collaborative corner of creativity. I had joined colleagues from the Department of English to host an outreach event encouraging better understanding of, and empathy with, ‘Nonhuman Species’ via a mixture of attention-grabbing science and imagination-sparking creativity.

Members of the Department of English helped children explore their creative sides by encouraging them to think about a number of different species and what their lives are like. Could they explain in an acrostic poem the nature of a tree? Whilst colouring in pictures of nightingales, could they stop and consider what emotions a nightingale’s song makes them feel? Or could they find their new favourite story in our stack of nature-themed books and lose themselves in a world away from the hustle and bustle of the hospital? Our empathy and fascination with the natural world and non-human species are key to our understanding and appreciating them so we hope that these activities will have sparked some curiosity in our young visitors.

At the same time, I paired with Creative Writing PhD student Bernadette McBride to show the public that science and creativity can belong hand-in-hand. I work in Dr Stew Plaistow’s lab group, investigating the effects of climate change on populations of Daphnia magna – so-called ‘water fleas’. Daphnia magna is a keystone species, meaning that, if it is affected by climate change, the impacts upon other species and factors within the ecosystems in which it resides will also be affected. As such, the importance of understanding temperature-induced effects on population diversity and genetic content in Daphnia cannot be understated.

I brought with me a model of the Plaistow lab group’s experimental pond set-up at Ness Gardens, Wirral. This allowed me to better explain our work to older participants but also gave the younger children the opportunity to catch Daphnia magna from our miniature ponds and see them up close and personal on a TV screen-equipped microscope. Children were shown the different body parts of the twitchy micro-crustaceans on the screen and were given Daphnia-themed word searches and colouring sheets, whilst older visitors were told all about the group’s research at Ness Gardens.

Bernadette, meanwhile, is writing a short story from the perspective of an individual Daphnia magna for a collection of tales concerning climate change. As such, children were given the opportunity to take what they’d learned about Daphnia magna and use their creativity and imagination to think about how Daphnia might feel and what they might notice about their environment as it changes through climate change.

We hope that our event made children think more about the natural world, as well as making the public aware that science and the arts don’t always have to be viewed as disparate entities – sometimes one can influence the other, leading to even greater insights. This is an event we intend to run again in future in different locations across the city as the Department of English looks to broaden its audience.

Amy Eacock and I enjoyed a great day at the Family Science Fair at Ness Botanic Gardens celebrating British Science Week. The theme was ‘feed the world’, and what is more topical at the moment than entomophagy! Entomophagy is the consumption of insects and despite being regarded rather contemptuously in the developed world; it is common in certain cultures and has been practiced since prehistoric times. Due to a growing global population there has been an increased demand for farmable land, fresh water and animal protein. Around 70% of farmable land is used to produce livestock, either directly or for the production of feed. The environmental costs surrounding intensive farming require urgent attention. There are also issues surrounding feed conversion rate, which is a measure of an animal’s efficiency in converting feed mass into animal protein. Although feed conversion rates differ between livestock species, around 6kg of plant protein are required to produce 1kg of animal protein.

A simple answer could be to remove livestock from our human diet and eat an entirely arable based diet, much like our hunter gatherer ancestors did. However, meat is culturally important in some societies and to eliminate it would simply not go down well. So, what are the alternatives? We could eat less meat, to reduce our need for land to grow high-energy cereals to feed livestock. An increasingly attractive alternative is to use insects to provide protein for our projected global population of 9 billion. We could do this by raising livestock on insect diets such as mealworms and fly larvae, or by consuming insects directly. Insects have a much higher feed conversion rate, require less water and space and produce lower quantities of toxic waste and greenhouse gases. For crickets, around 1.7kg of feed is required to produce 1kg of live animal weight. The graphs below compare the edible weight of crickets with different livestock species and highlight the advantages of consuming insects.

Other benefits to eating insects include the range of high quality nutrients they provide, which are comparable or superior to other sources of animal protein. Furthermore, insects have few animal welfare issues which make them ideal to farm.

Amy and I were equipped with live mealworms, crickets and locusts (for display and handling only) and processed insects for eating. These included sago worms, queen weaver ants, crickets, locusts, mealworms, buffalo worms, which are all considered delicacies in countries across the globe. My vote on the tastiest critter had to go to the barbeque flavoured bamboo worms followed by the garlic flavoured chapulines. So how did the crunchy critters go down? Well, overall we received a lot of interest from the general public and had whole families daring each other to eat certain critters. One man decided he liked locusts so much he came back for seconds, and even thirds. Overall, the day was a roaring success. Amy and I attempted to convince the public that insects can be quite tasty after all and should be considered as a food alternative to livestock protein.